<ChrisLilley> * ChrisLilley asks dajobe to wave irl if in the w3c track

<Bert_Bos> Long tail... Steven 2.0? :-)

<Mez> 1 was before my time, and I missed 5 and 7 (due to conflicts and budget respectively), but was on the PC for 5 (Hopgood; greatest organized program chair ever) and steering for 7, so I feel involved with all but the 1st

Panel Discussion: Innovation? History and Future of HTML

olivier: I was asking if there is still innovation in the realm of the webpage ...
... so question to ChrisL

ChrisL: what we need is to say that CR = "is it implementable"
... REC = "go out and use this now"

MichaelC: innovation will happen whether we as standards people do anything about it not
... what is important for us is to stay on top of it ...
... and make sure that accessibility is addressed asap ...

<schepers> .. needs to be top-down and bottom-up

<ChrisLilley> no, i still think it should go to rec, which says its passed CR. But then we need a Web Standard later, with a second CR-like period

DanC_lap: we need an HTML standard that levels the playing field [baseline of interoperability]

Arun talks about previous attempts to "rescue HTML from the clutches of the W3C"

DaveR: fixing problems of scripting and CSS are issues ...

<ChrisLilley> Dave: bigger problems with scripting and CSS than with HTML

DaveR: [we always need HTML even if we have higher-level authoring languages for generating HTML]

<ChrisLilley> bert refers to his postultimate slide

Bert: maintenance is essential

damn, chaals at the mic

Chaals: we need both [innovation and maintenance?]
... we have all individually been implementing some of this stuff (clipboard, etc). based on black magic and guessing what each other (browser vendors) have done
... [so we need standards for interoperability]

[ChrisL makes comment

chaals: to those of you have been "dragged out of the museum" to come here, what would have done differently?
... [now that you know what mistakes you made]

ChrisL: why did we have to so this SGML things?

<Bert_Bos> Naming and shaming. Yes, I'm doing that and have always done that, but can only be ahead of the implementations by a little bit, otherwise people will blame my site instead of the browsers.

ChrisL: I often wonder what would have happened if we had specified the syntax we had actually been using [not imposing SGML on top of it]
... which is what we are finally getting around to doing now [in the HTML WG]

<Mez> wikis irritate me for the same reason; no relative links

Audience Question: Flash, linking

<Mez> asked about the inability to link into Flash "do something! do something!" (a quote from, I think, Comedy of Errors)

<ThomasT> Jacek Kopecki, Deri Innsbruck

DanC: Flash is great for some things, but if you use it for things that HTML is better for [you are making a poor design choice]

<Bert_Bos> (Flash is only useful at leaf nodes on the Web.)

Arun: can't use semantic stuff in Flash -- for example, microformats

<schepers> * schepers notes that it's not up to W3C to make technical decisions for Flash... that's up to Adobe

Arun: W3C should be a place for those who are interested in "massive interoperability"

ChrisL: session states is what you are asking for and something that the W3C should be working on ...
... [Chris gives example of "playing with a webapp for 20 minutes, then you want to link to it, but you can only currently link to the start point, not the 20-minutes later point]

Audience Question: SMIL, XHTML2, HTML

Attendee: Do you see a future for SMIL?
... What is relationship between the HTML WG and XHTML2 WG ...
... what is your recommendation to Web authors about that? (what should we use) ...

[sound of can of worms opening]

Chris suggests that Steven Pemberton and DanC should answer that.

Steven: XHTML2 was designed on input from many communities

<JacekK> * JacekK voices apologies to Arun for calling him "the AOL guy"

Steven: trying to find an architecture for addressing a variety of problems ...
... and putting the solution into a single package ...
... it has been adopted in DIAL because it is an extremely good authoring format ...

<Bert_Bos> SMIL is doing fine, version 3 is under development. But for wider use, we need some good and free audio and video formats, and W3C doesn't make those.

Steven: one for which you don't necessarily need browser support ...

DanC: I am much less ambitious

<Bert_Bos> The Ogg formats look promising though.

DanC: my goal is how to specify the stuff you are already seeing fly by on the wire

RhysLewis: DIAL is my fault ...
... we decided what we wanted to do was come up with a "clean" authoring language ...
... in this model, what authors write is not what goes to the device ...
... I think at the moment, the power of XHTML is that it provides the basis for that clean authoring language ...

[attendee not very satisfied with that answer]

<ChrisLilley> attendee wonders, if it can be transformed, why use xforms

Attendee: You can't transform the complex features of XForms to HTML forms

Rhys: I'm sorry, you're wrong. You can.

<ChrisLilley> answer is that what you transform to is deeply ugly (but works)

Bert: We tryed to use the word "level" instead of "version" to help make things more clear

Chris: relates to what I was talking about earlier with how we need something more between CR and Rec

<ChrisLilley> but it didn't, really

Arun: versioning on specs is bane of anybody who's trying to figure out what to do
... use a good authoring tool ...
... so you are then insulated from that problem ...

RickEfromUofWashington: I was involved in WCAG 2, where we did a lot of reviews of draft ...
... made me wonder how are we doing on process ...
... is the current W3C process "doing the job"

DanC: there was a time when the 200 people in this room would have been "it" ...

[that would have been the whole set of people you needed to convince of anything

scribe: now it's a certain amount of "shoot in the dark" ...
... because of hugeness of community ...

ChrisL: I'm not quite as pessimistic as DanC ...
... it's not all volunteers ...
... there are people in many orgs who are paid [full time] to work on standards-related activities

DanC: it works well when W3C gets involved at the right time ...
... example: GRDDL, which is still a relatively small community ...

<Mez> the way that businesses convince is a lot of people's to have marketing and sales, get feedback from customers, and charge them :-)

Chaals: we are the guys in the middle [between low-water mark and high-water mark]
... I quite like XHTML2 ...
... (for reasons StevenP mentioned) ...

<ChrisLilley> actually, you guys are lifting the low water mark

Chaals: on the other hand, we (Opera) make a browser for people to use ...
... we address what /users/ want ...

<ChrisLilley> html 3.2 is submerged. below the low water mark. hopefully it will drown

Chaals: it's a popularity contest ...

StevenP: I think it is difficult for browser builders ...
... there is not a good economic model for building a browser ...
... so I think you can't blame them for that ...

<Bert_Bos> Charles seems to imply that browsers (or at least Opera) are not the driving force for innovation anymore...

StevenP: though I do remember hearing one guy say that XSLT would only go into his company's browser "over his dead body" ...
... and it's in there now ...

<ChrisLilley> Steven notes that Hakon is not in fact dead. Despite XSLT being in Opera

* MikeSmith says damn right to that ... XSLT++

<Klaus_> Klaus_ is now known as Klaus

<Steven_> * Steven_ notes that he didn't actually name the person, CHris did ;-)

<ChrisLilley> "naming and ...."

Audience Question: W3C's messaging toward non-developers

[VirginiaFromTorontoStockExchange asking a question]

<Steven_> (For the record: I didn't name the person, despite the record above)

Virginia: As a product manager and usability expert, I find that your (W3C) communication is not geared to me ...

<Mez> * Mez loves that comment

Olivier: W3C has historically been about getting specs out the door and hoping people are there waiting to do something with it

DaveR: the new HTML WG has many public participants and volunteers ...

<Mez> any comm team in the house?

DaveR: hopefully some people within that group will volunteer to help with improving communication

Virginia: Realize that there are people keenly working within the Web space who are not developers.

<Mez> it's the "why it's like this" that's really valuable

<DanC_lap> (usability is another thing that's squeaking into the W3C program of work. esp. the new security context WG.)

Audience Question: on the probabilty of unforeseen uses, spec architecture

NoahM from IBM and W3C TAG asking a question

<Mez> for example, I was just reading the "allow cross site reading" spec, and Art had said it was supposed to enable specific use cases. I really wanted to read some examples, in some other document, linked from the spec (since they're not spec material)

<Bert_Bos> Several W3C Offices also have excellent material, summaries, etc.

Noah: I think it's harder that it's harder than we are letting on ...

<mauro_banff> [yes, Mez, 5 in the podium + Olivier, and at least 4 or 5 on the audience]

<ChrisLilley> I find that if the spec isd too terse and formal, that developers second guess and 'improve'; its important to say why a choice was made

Noah: I worked on Lotus and well understand the problem of not letting architecture getting too far ahead

[somebody please help with logging what Noah is saying]

<Mez> * Mez not getting it yet; sorry

Noah: [example of soundness of GET design]
... to just at the right time notice the few places where, if you don't take the trouble now to make better architecture ...

<ChrisLilley> i think noah is saying, allow unforseen uses. pages authored for humans being harvested for bots. otherwise it closes out innovation

<ChrisLilley> I *think* that is his point

Noah: you are locking into limited architecture that is not going to be extensible later ...

[we are closing the session]

<Bert_Bos> About misuse of GET and POST, that is not clearly explained to developers in a hurry.